angrywerewolfvoid

[mosylufanfic]

The Permission Slip

Because @anghraine mentioned PTA AU, and her brain went one place and mine went another.

The Permission Slip

Jyn opened the door as quietly as possible and slid into the school library. Not that she really should have bothered with stealth. The big room echoed with chatter and laughter and suddenly, happy shrieking as something went pop!

She leaned her back against the wall, looking around. She vaguely remembered coming here on a long-ago Parent Night. At the time, the posters had been dusty and faded, the shelves looming, and the tables dirty. Not to mention a sour librarian who'd been quick to tell her that Lyra refused to stick to books at her grade level, and hadn't taken it well when Jyn had snapped back that maybe the librarian shouldn't be giving her kid boring-ass shit she didn't want to read.

Now it looked bright and warm, the tables all pushed together at one end, sunlight streaming in through the windows. The new librarian had been making changes. Impressive considering he split his time between here and the high school.

The top half of the shelves were empty, all the books moved down. She wondered where the rest of them had gone. Still, there were enough books to make her itchy. She'd kicked the dust of school off her Doc Martens ten years ago, and while she'd gotten her GED, she still wasn't a fan of scholastic environments in general.

Lyra, she reminded herself. She was here for Lyra. For Lyra, she’d walk over hot coals and swallow live scorpions and -

And take the afternoon off work to tell her kid’s school librarian a thing or two.

She examined one poster that said, "Join the Rebellion - Read!" with a picture of some cheesy sci-fi movie. Then she drifted over to study the certificates and photos mounted above the desk. The photos showed the same man, different ages, but always dressed in a cap and gown. The first one was the cheap plasticky gown that she remembered seeing in people's high-school graduation pictures. But they got progressively fancier until the last picture showed him in the heavy black gown and colorful hood of movie academics. She glanced at the diploma next to it. University of Arizona, Masters' of Library Science, it read.

She snorted.

He was pretty good-looking, though. When he smiled.

A couple of sharp claps brought her head around. At the tables, the older version of the man in the photos called out, "It's ten to five, ladies and gentleman, time to clean up!" He had a faint accent, an angle to the vowels and pressure on unexpected consonants. It was nice. "I want your wrappers in the trash, your crumbs swept up, and all your materials put away. Let's go, vamanos!"

Most of the teachers at Yavin K-8 were pretty casual, but he wore a button-down shirt with a tie. Who wore a tie anymore? And those shiny shoes. Jesus.

He looked around and his eyes met hers. His brows pulled together. "Can I help you, ma'am?"

"Mom!"  A tiny rocket in a blue t-shirt burst out of the crowd of kids, sprinted across the library, and slammed square into Jyn's side.

Jyn wrapped her arms around her nine-year-old daughter. "Heya, stardust."

"Where's Bodhi?" Lyra Erso's face scrunched. "Is he having one of his bad days?" she said wisely.

After two tours in Afghanistan, their neighbor and his PTSD had a hard time holding down a steady job, but he could usually manage to look after Lyra until Jyn got home from work. Jyn thought they probably traded off looking after each other, but she still paid Bodhi Rook a little money every week. It was cheaper than daycare, it supplemented his disability checks, and it kept CPS off her back. Wins all around as far as she was concerned.

Jyn brushed her daughter's hair out of her eyes. "No, he's just fine. He had some appointments at the VA today. Remember? I told you I was going to come pick you up."

"Ohhhh yeahhhhhh," Lyra said.

"Ohhhhh yeahhhhh," Jyn mocked her gently.

Lyra twisted around, then peeled herself away from Jyn's side to jump up and down, as if to catch the attention of the man already walking over. "Mr. Andor, Mr. Andor! This is my mom."

She suddenly wanted to tug at the frayed cuffs of her flannel shirt and check her worn cargo pants for dirt. She stiffened her spine. If a woman in honest work clothes wasn't fancy enough for him, screw him and his shiny shoes.

"Yes, I see that, Lyra." He held out his hand. "Cassian Andor."

"Jyn Erso," she said, shaking it. His hand was warm, and more callused than she would have expected from someone who read books for a living.

"Have you come to see what we do in Science Club?"

"Actually, I came to speak to you about this." She rooted in her back pocket and pulled a many-folded piece of paper out, unfolding it so he could see what it was.

Of course, he knew what it was; he'd sent it home two weeks ago.

His eyes dropped to the paper. She thought he might have sighed, but it also might have been her imagination.

"Of course," he said. "I have to supervise cleanup and walk the kids out to the late bus. But after that, I'd be happy to hear your concerns, if you don't mind waiting."

"I got nothing but time," she said.

His brow quirked, as if he could hear the sarcasm she thought she'd buried.

He turned to her daughter. "Lyra, go clean up your spot, please," he said. Without protest she dashed off. "No running!" he called out and shook his head.

"Lost cause," Jyn said. "She came out running and hasn't stopped since."

He looked over his shoulder with something that might have been a smile or might just have been a grimace, and turned back to the kids. Wading back into the fray, he called out, "Poe Dameron, this is not the soccer pitch. You go walk and put that trash in the trash can."

A curly-headed boy looked up with a giant, face-splitting grin. "Aaaaahhh, Señor - "

The librarian said something stern-sounding in Spanish. Poe sighed deeply, but didn't seem abashed in the least. When he dropped a ball of trash into the can, Andor paused in the middle of pulling a tiny pink jacket right-side-out to nod to him.

Jyn noticed that the small acknowledgement made the boy beam as if he'd just been handed the World Cup. Apparently her kid wasn't the only one who thought Mr. Andor had hung the moon.

Feeling extraneous, she looked around and found a chair behind the desk. She settled herself into it, watching him herd children toward the door. Lyra came dashing over again. "Mom, you're in Mr. Andor's chair."

"It's all right, Lyra," Mr. Andor said. "You can stay here with your mom while I take the others out, okay?"

"Okay!"

"I'll see you in a bit." He nodded at Jyn, then reached out and tapped Poe Dameron's shoulder. The boy, who'd been half-draped on the desk staring at the graduation pictures, blinked and grinned again, then rushed to follow Mr. Andor to the front of the line.

Jyn watched the other kids pile out after the librarian, all chattering and giggling and shoving and wiggling and generally being kids. He moved along at the front of the line as calm and cool as a shark with a school of guppies on his tail.

She turned to her daughter. "So, kid, tell me, how was school today?"

Jyn listened to Lyra telling her all about Science Club's latest experiment, and the math test she'd aced, and the deadly dull Social Studies lesson, so dull she'd wanted to fall out of her chair and diiiiiiiiiie. "Oh, and Kyle was being a total jerk to Poe on the playground so I tripped him."

"Did anybody see you?"

"Nope! And Kyle will never admit that a girl took him down, so it was the perfect crime."

"Good work." Jyn held up her hand for a high-five.

Mr. Andor came back in, sans guppies. "Thank you for waiting, ladies," he said. He went behind the desk and pulled out a giant, heavy book with a shiny foil cover that read Guinness World Records. "Lyra, this just came in. Would you like to sit over there and review it for me?"

Her eyes widened, and she took it like she was handling the Ark of the Covenant. Without a glance at Jyn, she took it to the set of tables across the library.

Mr. Andor pulled over another chair and sat down. "Now. How can I help you?"

Jyn tapped the permission slip. It was a list of book titles and a short block of text at the bottom, telling her that she could choose to allow or deny her daughter the privilege of checking some or all of them out from the library. "Like I said. It's this. I'd like to know where you get off, sending something like this home."

He said smoothly, "Mrs. Erso - "

"Ms," she snapped. "Never married, don't care to be."

"Ms Erso," he said. "The books on this list are recent additions to the library." He waved his hand at a shelf behind them, lined with shiny-new volumes. "They are here for your review, if you choose. If you would rather Lyra not have access to them, all you have to do is sign the second line - "

"Lyra is getting access to every book on this list, and every book in this goddamn library. The ones you haven't managed to throw away." She glared narrow-eyed around her, the empty shelves suddenly sinister. "What is this bullshit?"

"We're in a school, Ms. Erso, please don't curse." He studied her. "You want her to read these? You know the topics?"

"Do I know the topic of this book?" She poked at one of the titles, which was It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health. "Uh, yeah, I think I can sound out all the words."

"It's just that all the parents who have already spoken to me would rather - "

"Listen, bub, attitudes like that are how Lyra got here. My foster parents told me all the contraception I needed was abstinence, and you see how that worked out for the two of us." She crossed her arms. "I wouldn't trade my kid in for all the gold in Fort Knox, but I also don't want her knocked up before she's legal to vote, like I was. Now maybe that's how you get your jollies, but locking information about her own damn body and how it works into a vault is the opposite of helpful. I don't know the stats - "

"I do," he said.

"Okay, so you know this stuff is basic as hell - "

"Ms. Erso, please - "

"My kid's heard worse and she's the only one here. This stuff is basic as hell. What happens when she wants to know about things you can't even bring yourself to buy a book for? Sex isn't a dirty word, Mr. Andor. In fact, done right it's a whole hell of a lot of fun. But I wouldn't expect you to know that."

He didn't rise to the challenge, at least not with words. But he shot her a single, sizzling glance that made every nerve in her body leap to attention.

Holy shit. A librarian should not be able to look at a woman like that.

While she was still trying to battle back her blush, he said, "As it happens, Ms. Erso, I agree. Every child in this school should have access to these books, to information about their body and their health." He tapped the paper. "This is bullshit."

She blinked at him.

"But this is the bullshit compromise I've managed to drag out of my principal after six months of fighting to be able to buy these books in the first place."

All she could think to say was, "You shouldn't have settled."

"Six months ago, I would have agreed. But would you like to hear some of the other things I'm fighting for?" Without waiting for her answer, he ticked them off on his fingers. "A budget that's not a wad of singles and a coupon to Borders. Permission for a special ESL collection at both schools. Weeding and updating two libraries that still had books about East and West Germany. Computers that aren't from the 20th century. And did I mention the budget? Of course I care about access to information. It's one of the things I care about the most. But right now, I've got to fight the battles I can win." His eyes dropped to the paper again. "Unfortunately, this, I have to count as a win."

She screwed up her mouth. "So your principal is the one I need to be raking over the coals."

"Principal Draven's not a bad man. He's fighting his own battles, is all. It was quite a concession he made, considering this whole thing might be a moot point next month."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know if you've seen the agenda for the next school board meeting - "

"Hey, buddy, I'm a little busy working my ass off trying to keep food on the table and a roof over my kid's head. I don't have time to read every flyer and email that gets sent home."

"Even if you did, you might have missed it. They've been very quiet about the whole thing."

"What whole thing?"

"At the next meeting in three weeks, the school board is going to vote on an abstinence-only sex education policy for all the schools in Scarif County."

Her mouth fell open. "Fuck that noise!"

Across the library, Lyra looked up, her brows crinkled warily. She'd heard Jyn swear before, of course. Pretty much since birth. But she knew her mom's mad voice.

"It's okay, baby," Jyn called to her. "Just talking. Go back to your book."

Lyra, not actually stupid, looked at Cassian, who gave her a little nod. She went back to her book, shaking her head at the mysterious ways of grown-ups.

Jyn said, "How long have you known about this?"

"Since a faculty meeting at the high school last week."

"And? What are you doing about it?"

"There are some teachers besides me who object. There's one, Leia Organa - she teaches government and history, and oversees the debate team. She's working with her kids to speak at the meeting. But the parents are a harder sell. A lot of them think abstinence-only is the way to go. More so at this age." He waved a hand around the library. "And the ones that don't, well, they don't think they can win the fight."

She pressed her hand to her stomach. "So it's just going to happen."

"It's certainly not going to be brought down by a few teachers." He gave her a long, considering look. "What this really needs is a parent to speak up, and a whole lot of parents behind her."

"Oh," she said. "Wait. Uh-uh. You're not volunteering me for this."

"Why not? You had no problem getting in my face. You were even looking forward to spitting in the principal's eye. What's the problem staring down a school board?"

"It's different," she mumbled. "And it's not just that. You're talking about me going out and, like, inspiring people - I'm not inspirational, okay? I don't have a herd of Facebook mommy friends to whip into a frenzy. I go to work, I hang with my kid, sometimes I drink with my neighbor, and I go to sleep. That's my exciting life. I'm not a hero."

"Don't you know anybody who might be slightly concerned?"

She fiddled with a button on her shirt. "The whole school district is going to adopt this policy?"

"The whole school district. K through twelve."

"My bosses," she said slowly. "They have a foster son up at the high school. You might know him - Finn? Shit, I can never remember his last name. Good-looking black kid?"

"Junior? Transferred in at Christmas? Attached by the hand to Rey Skywalker?" When she nodded, he nodded too. "He's a good kid."

"Considering everything, he's a great kid. Anyway, his foster dads, Chirrut and Baze, they lived in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic. You wanna talk some war stories. Not to mention, the way they're going, their son and Rey aren't going to stop at hands. They'd probably have something to say about sex ed."

"Okay," he said. "It's a start."

She rubbed her hand over her mouth. Oh, Christ. She was going to do this. How had he talked her into this?

"Do you think this can be done?" she asked him. "You think we can actually yell loud enough to keep this backwards, Puritanical garbage out?"

"I don't know," he admitted frankly. "There's a lot of support on the other side. Plenty of parents, and the big church in town - but I'll tell you what." He leaned forward a little. His hair fell over his forehead and he suddenly looked five years younger. "I like our chances better than I did half an hour ago."

She found herself smiling. He smiled back.

"I have to warn you," he said. "I don't have a lot of personal clout with the school board. Half of them think I'm overpaid and overqualified, and my contract is only for this year. I'm going to do my best work behind the scenes."

"I'll take that," she said. "I'll take whatever you got."

"You're welcome to it."

She found herself asking, "Would you like to come home with me?"

His eyes went wide. "I - uh - I don't think that - "

She squinted at him, then played back her own words and gulped. "Oh my god! I meant for a strategy session over mac and cheese, not - " She stole a glance at Lyra. She was still nose-deep in the book. Still, Jyn lowered her voice. "Not to play the beast with two backs while my kid is in the next room. What the hell do you think of me?"

"I have no idea what to think of you," he said. He'd gone red, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Join the club," she said. "They have t-shirts."

He snorted, very softly, in a way that was almost a laugh.

She rubbed her palms over the knees of her cargo pants. She suspected that she wouldn't have been half so embarrassed if the idea hadn't sounded quite so amazing. She wondered if that was why he'd reacted the way he had

"Look," she said. "You said you know the stats. You sound like you know the players, too. I don't know any of that. And I don't know where to start."

"And we only have three weeks."

"Exactly. So? Mac and cheese and plotting the downfall of the school board?"

"That sounds . . ." He nodded a couple of times, then met her eyes. "Yes. I would like that."

"Good," she said, scrawling her address on a scrap of paper and handing it to him. "Because that's all that's on offer." She looked at him through her lashes. "At the moment."

His eyebrows went up, and just when she thought he was going to poker up on her again, he grinned. It wasn't the triumphant smile of his graduation pictures, or the supportive smile of a few minutes ago, but something sly and sexy and - oh. Oh wow. She might be in over her head.

Her favorite place to be.

She went across the room to tug at her daughter's ponytail. "Hey, kid," she said. "Turn your book back in and grab your stuff. We're bugging out."

"Awww," Lyra said, but she shut the book and carried it to the desk. Cassian - when had she started thinking of him as Cassian? - waved at her from his office, where he was shutting down his computer and packing books and folders into a satchel.

Jyn felt heat touch her cheeks again as their eyes met, and she looked away first, glancing down at her daughter as she wrestled with her backpack.

"Hey, so, um. Mr. Andor's coming over for dinner. Is that going to be weird?"

"Wait, what? Really?" Lyra bounced with excitement, then stopped and peered up at her. "Why?"

"He's going to help me with - uh - with a project. Boring, grownup stuff."

"Do I have to help?"

Jyn ruffled her hair. "Not tonight. You focus on your homework."

Lyra flicked her bangs out of her eyes. "Are you going to start making trouble, Mom?"

"Probably."

She grinned. "Awesome."

"Seriously?"

"Bodhi says you've been cruising too long. He says everyone needs to cause trouble now and then."

She thought of the fight ahead of her, and found herself smiling. "Bodhi may not be wrong."

It took many, many strategy meetings, about a billion emails and phone calls, enough stats and studies to choke a horse, and even a few Saturdays going door to door. But the vote on abstinence-only in Scarif County was deferred twice and finally, definitively struck down in favor of a more comprehensive sex-ed program. Not perfect - what was? - but not as bad as simply telling kids not to do something they were going to do anyway.

After the third, victorious meeting, some said that they'd spotted the school librarian and the fiery parent that had led the charge against the proposal, making out against his car like a couple of horny teenagers.

Even if they were, Leia Organa said, so what? They were adults.

FINIS

[kmclaude]

Forgive me Father, I have no awful headcanons for you, only a general question on comic making. How do you do it, writing-wise/how do you decide what points go where, how do you plot it out (or do you have any resources on the writing aspect that you find useful?) Not to get too bogged down in details, but I attended a writer’s workshop and the author in residence suggested I transfer my wordy sci-fi WIP into graphic novel script, as it might work better. (I do draw, but I don’t know if I have it in me to draw a whole comic—characters in motion? Doing things? With backgrounds? How dare, why can’t everyone just stand around looking pretty)

I was interested but it quickly turned into a lot of internal screaming as I tried to figure out how to compress the hell out of it, since novels are free to do a lot more internal monologuing and such compared to a comic format (to say nothing of trying to write a script without seeing how the panels lay out—just for my own sake, I might have to do both concurrently.)

As an aside, to get a feel for graphic novels I was rereading 99RM and was reminded of how great it was—tightly plotted, intriguing, and anything to do with Ashmedai was just beautifully drawn. I need more Monsignor Tiefer and something something there are parallels between Jehan and Daniel in my head and I don’t know if they make sense but it works for me. (As an aside, I liked the emphasis on atonement being more than just the word sorry, but acknowledgment you did wrong and an attempt to remedy it—I don’t know why that spoke to me the way that it did.)

I thought Tumblr had a word count limit for asks but so far it has offered zero resistance, oh well. I don’t have much else to say but on the topic of 99RM, Adam getting under Monsignor’s skin is amazing, 10/10 (about the Pride picture earlier)

wow tumblr got rid of the markdown editor! or at least in asks which means the new editor probably has no markdown....god i hate this site! anyway...

Totally! So first, giant thank you for the compliments! Second, I have a few questions in turn for you before I dive into a sort of answer, since I can give some advice to your questions in general but it also sounds like you have a specific conundrum on your hands.

My questions to your specific situation are:

did the author give any reason for recommending a, in your words, "wordy" story be turned into a graphic novel?

is the story you're writing more, like you said, "internal monologuing"? action packed? where do the visuals come from?

do you WANT it to be a comic? furthermore, do you want it to be a comic you then must turn around and draw? or would you be interested in writing for comics as a comic writer to have your words turned into art?

With those questions in mind, let me jump into the questions you posed me!

Let me start with a confession...

I've said this before but let me say it again: Ninety-Nine Righteous Men was not originally a comic — it was a feature-length screenplay! And furthermore, it was written for a class so it got workshopped again and again to tighten the plot by a classroom of other nerds — so as kind as your compliments are, I'm giving credit where credit is due as that was not just a solo ship sailing on the sea. On top of that, it got adapted (by me) into a comic for my thesis, so my advisor also helped me make it translate or "read" well given I was director, actor, set designer, writer, editor, SFX guy, etc. all in one. And it was a huge help to have someone say "there is no way you can go blow by blow from script to comic: you need to make edits!" For instance, two scenes got compressed to simple dialogue overlaid on the splashpage of Ashmedai raping Caleb (with an insert panel of Adam and Daniel talking the next day.) What had been probably at least 5 pages became 1.

Additionally, I don't consider myself a strong plotter. That said, I found learning to write for film made the plotting process finally make some damn sense since the old plot diagram we all got taught in grammar school English never made sense as a reader and definitely made 0 sense as a writer — for me, for some reason, the breakdown of 25-50-25 (approx. 25 pages for act 1, 50 for act 2 split into 2 parts of 25 each, 25 pages for act 3) and the breaking down of the beats (the act turning points, the mid points, the low point) helped give me a structure that just "draw a mountain, rising action, climax is there, figure it out" never did. Maybe the plot diagram is visually too linear when stories have ebb and flow? I don't know. But it never clicked until screenwriting. So that's where I am coming from. YMMV.

I should also state that there's Official Ways To Write Comic Scripts to Be Drawn By An Artist (Especially If You Work For A Real Publisher As a Writer) and there's What Works For You/Your Team. I don't give a rat's ass about the former (and as an artist, I kind of hate panel by panel breakdowns like you see there) so I'm pretty much entirely writing on the latter here. I don't give a good god damn about official ways of doing anything: what works for you to get it done is what matters.

What Goes Where?

Like I said, 99RM was a screenplay so it follows, beat-wise, the 3-act screenplay structure (hell, it's probably more accurate to say it follows the act 1/act 2A/act 2B/act 3 structure.) So there was the story idea or concept that then got applied to those story beats associated with the structure, and from there came the Scene-by-scene Breakdown (or Expanded Scene Breakdown) which basically is an outline of beats broken down into individual scenes in short prose form so you get an overview of what happens, can see pacing, etc. In the resources at the end I put some links that give information on the whole story beat thing.

(As an aside: for all my short comics, I don't bother with all that, frankly. I usually have an image or a concept or a bit of writing — usually dialogue or monologue, sometimes a concrete scene — that I pick at and pick at in a little sketchbook, going back and forth between writing and thumbnail sketches of the page. Or I just go by the seat of my pants and bullshit my way through. Either or. Those in many ways are a bit more like poems, in my mind: they are images, they are snapshots, they are feelings that I'm capturing in a few panels. Think doing mental math rather than writing out geometric proofs, yanno?)

Personally, I tend to lean on dialogue as it comes easier for me (it's probably why I'm so drawn to screenwriting!) so for me, if I were to do another longform GN, I'd probably take my general "uhhhhhh I have an idea and some beats maybe so I guess this should happen this way?" outline and start breaking it down scene by scene (I tend to write down scenes or scene sketches in that "uhhhh?" outline anyway LOL) and then figure out basic dialogue and action beats — in short, I'd kind of do the work of writing a screenplay without necessarily going full screenplay format (though I did find the format gave me an idea of timing/pacing, as 1 page of formatted script is about equal to 1 minute of screentime, and gave me room to sketch thumbnails or make edits on the large margins!) If you're not a monologue/soliloque/dialogue/speech person and more an image and description person, you may lean more into visuals and scenes that cut to each other.

Either way this of course introduces the elephant in the panel: art! How do you choose what to draw?

The answer is, well, it depends! The freedom of comics is if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You have the freedoms (and audio limitations) of a truly silent film with none of the physical limitations. Your words can move in real time with the images or they can be a narrative related to the scene or they could be nonsequitors entirely! The better question is how do you think? Do you need all the words and action written first before you break down the visuals? Do you need a panel by panel breakdown to be happy, or can you freewheel and translate from word and general outlines to thumbnails? What suits you? I really cannot answer this because I think when it comes to what goes where with regard to art, it's a bit of "how do you process visuals" and also a bit of "who's drawing this?" — effectively, who is the interpreter for the exact thing you are writing? Is it you or someone else? If it's you, would you benefit from a barebones script alongside thumbnailed paneling? Would you be served by a barebones script, then thumbnails, then a new script that includes panel and page breakdowns? What frees you up to do what you need to do to tell your story?

If I'm being honest, I don't necessarily worry about panels or what something will look like necessarily until I'm done writing. I may have an image that I clearly state needs to happen. I may even have a sequence of panels that I want to see and I do indeed sketch that out and make note of it in my script. But exactly how things will be laid out, paneled, situated? That could change up until I've sketched my final pencils in CSP (but I am writer and artist so admittedly I get that luxury.)

How do I compress from novel to comic?

Honest answer? You don't. Not really. You adapt from one to another. It's more a translation. Something that would take forever to write may take 1 page in a comic or may take a whole issue.

I'm going to pick on Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo spent a whole-ass book in Notre-Dame de Paris talking about a bird's eye view of Paris and other medieval architecture boring stuff, with I guess some foreshadowing with Montfaucon. Who cares. Not me. I like story. Anyway. When we translate that book to a movie any of the billion times someone's done that, we don't spend a billion years talking at length about medieval Paris. There's no great monologuing about the gibbet or whatever: you get to have some establishing shots, maybe a musical number, and then you move tf on. Because it's a movie, right? Your visuals are right there. We can see medieval Paris. We can see the cathedral. We can see the gibbet. We don't need a whole book: it's visually right there. Same with a comic: you may need many paragraphs to describe, say, a space station off of Sirius and one panel to show it.

On the flip side, you may take one line, maybe two, to say a character keyed in the special code to activate the holodeck; depending on the visual pacing, that could be a whole page of panels (are we trying to stretch time? slow it down? what are we emphasizing?) A character gives a sigh of relief — one line of text, yeah? That could be a frozen panel while a conversation continues on or that could be two (or more!) panels, similar to the direction [a beat] in screenwriting.

Sorry there's not a super easy answer there to the question of compression: it's a lot more of a tug, a push-pull, that depends on what you're conveying.

So Do I Have It In Me to Write & Draw a GN?

The only way you'll know is by doing. Scary, right? The thing is, you don't necessarily need to be an animation king or God's gift to background artists to draw a comic.

Hell, I hate backgrounds. I still remember sitting across from my friend who said "Claude you really need to draw an establishing exterior of the church at some point" and me being like "why do you hate me specifically" because drawing architecture? Again? I already drew the interior of the church altar ONCE, that should be enough, right? But I did draw an exterior of the church. Sorta. More like the top steeple. Enough to suggest what I needed to suggest to give the audience a better sense of place without me absolutely losing my gourd trying to render something out of my wheelhouse at the time.

And that's kinda the ticket, I think. Not everyone's a master draftsman. Not everyone has all the skills in every area. And regardless, from page one to page one hundred, your skills will improve. That's all part of it — and in the meantime, you should lean into your strengths and cheat where you can.

Do you need to lovingly render a background every single panel? Christ no! Does every little detail need to be drawn out? Sure if you want your hand to fall off. Cheat! Use Sketchup to build models! Use Blender to sculpt forms to paint over! Use CSP Assets for prebuilt models and brushes if you use CSP! Take photographs and manip them! Cheat! Do what you need to do to convey what you need to convey!

For instance, a tip/axiom/"rule" I've seen is one establishing shot per scene minimum and a corollary to that has been include a background once per page minimum as grounding (no we cannot all have eternal floating heads and characters in the void. Unless your comic is set in the void. In which case, you do you.) People ain't out here drawing hyper detailed backgrounds per each tiny panel. The people who DO do that are insane. Or stupid. Or both. Or have no deadline? Either way, someone's gonna have a repetitive stress injury... Save yourself the pain and the headache. Take shortcuts. Save your punches for the big K.O. moments.

Start small. Make an 8-page zine. Tell a beginning, a middle, an end in comic form. Bring a scene to life in a few pages. See what you're comfortable drawing and where you struggle. See where you can lean heavily into your comfort zones. Learn how to lean out of your comfort zone. Learn when it's worth it to do the latter.

Or start large. Technically my first finished comic (that wasn't "a dumb pencil thing I drew in elementary school" or "that 13 volume manga I outlined and only penciled, what, 7 pages of in sixth grade" or "random one page things I draw about my characters on throw up on the interwebz") was 99RM so what do I know. I'm just some guy on the internet.

(That's not self-deprecating, I literally am some guy on the internet talking about my path. A lot of this is gonna come down to you and what vibes with you.)

Resources on writing

Some of these are things that help me and some are things that I crowd-sourced from others. Some of these are going to be screenwriting based, some will be comic based.

Making Comics by Scott McCloud: I think everyone recommends this but I think it is a useful book if you're like "ahh!!! christ!! where do I start!!!???" It very much breaks down the elements of comics and the world they exist in and the principles involved, with the caveat that there are no rules! In fact, I need to re-read it.

Comic Book Design: I picked this up at B&N on a whim and in terms of just getting a bird's eye view of varied ways to tackle layout and paneling? It's such a great resource and reference! I personally recommend it as a way to really get a feel for what can be done.

the screenwriter's bible: this is a book that was used in my class. we also used another book that's escaping me but to be honest, I never read anything in school and that's why I'm so stupid. anyway, I'd say check it out if you want, especially if you start googling screenwriting stuff and it's like 20 billion pieces of advice that make 0 sense -- get the core advice from one place and then go from there.

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: many people I know recommended this. I think I have it? It may be in storage. So frankly, I'd already read a bunch of books on comics before grabbing this that it kind of felt like a rehash. Which isn't shade on the authors — I personally was just a sort of "girl, I don't need comics 101!!!"

Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate: this has been recommended so many times to me. I cannot personally speak on it but I can say I do trust those who rec'd it to me so I am passing it along

the story circle: this is pretty much the hero's journey. a useful way to think of journeys! a homie pretty much swears by it

a primer on beats: quick google search got me this that outlines storybeats

save the cat!: what the above refers to, this gives a more genre-specific breakdown. also wants to sell you on the software but you don't need that.

I hope this helps and please feel free to touch base with more info about your specific situation and hopefully I'll have more applicable answers.

[scribbling-scribbles]

Main Story Outline

Black and White (working title)

Part I- Will joins the Black court (White Court)

Who's Red

meeting

remember? Backstory (kinda)

what is the white court? What do you do? 

This is abuse. I'm getting you out

I get you have a skewed perspective, but, really!

you don't need to be anyone's soldier

you sold your SOUL?!

Okay, how can we do this? It's time for research! 

Introduce Glass Mask sub-plot

A powerful artifact and semi-sentient, produced as the universe’s counter to magic.

Will is intrigued, but ultimately decides the mask would be too dangerous to use.

At some point, Will dips into more magical sources, either on purpose or by accident, and one of the Black Lady’s servants comes to confront him.

A method! Let us execute it!

The Board and the Rites

Preparing

Finding. The damn. Contracts.

Start the Rites

Crap!

Attack! (Battle of the Board)(that's as far as they get before they are caught. The Board has some very powerful magical significance, though, and is usually where part of the contract-making process occurs)

Will sells his soul, and regains some memories.

Part II- Will and Red re-align and plan (Black Court)

Introduction to the court

Infinite apartment building, from a modification on the standard infinite forest. As far as human members are concerned, exits only lead to the Board, the Market, and various points in the human world. These exits are arrayed around the building, almost seeming at random, but there is a pattern somewhere. There is a time dilation, but not a large or consistent one. Like +/- 1 day.

The Black Lady, her rules and ruling

The court and the developers

It appears I need a new name.

Who are you guys? What are we doing

Time passes

Will/Tim befriends the developers and other members of the court

Angst and sweetness with Joe/ Volto

Any’s mech, a subplot 

Movie night!

Damn, the Game’s sound kind of even more horrible than I thought.

The Basement, i.e. the torture chamber for Bad Courtiers (maybe run by Steve? Maybe Steve is constantly tortured? Steve is involved)

Tim does R&D

Let’s all go to the Market!

Continuation of the Glass Mask sub-plot

I have modified some cool magic based off of physics because gODDAMNIT, science works!

Tim is slightly obsessed with incorporating iron into anything possible. Iron salts are his new best friend. 

Tim and Red (Rose) meet (again)

So I was hoping you would still remember me? No? Well s hit.

Timur should have expected it sooner.

I’m not a Black mage. I just wanted us to be clear on that. I am a developer, there is a difference, I'm not on the board.

I didn't give my whole name. This should give me a bit more leeway in my obedience. I still can't outright harm, but neglect and sedition is much easier than it would have been.

We're friends. I mean, I forgot, now you've forgotten... It's complicated.

We had a plan. Not a good one, but it existed.

No, really, they're evil, I swear

Tim becomes a piece.

Fuck.

After first game

Will and Taylor team up

We are looking for leads a bit deeper in Faerieland and oH SHOOT WE'VE BEEN ATTACKED, but Tim saves the day.

Emma shows up

The hell are you doing here?!/ Nerd?! // What the hell, you remember me?/ What the hell, you're real?

New recruits came all the time 

Some more dialogue

"I sold it," Tim said

Some more dialogue

"What did you trade?"

Tim explains what he can/ is willing to.

Emma’s side of it

“I was pretty sure I remembered you, but there was no official documents proving you existed, so that messed me up for a while.”

“Then I decided ‘screw that’ and went to find you anyway.”

There was a sound like discordant wind chimes.

“What you thought I found you all by myself? Heck no, I got help.”

Team includes Stacy (phone friend), a couple other of

Emma’s friends, and Peter, Will’s friend who no longer remembers him.

No one has official connections to either Court except Emma.

(Huh) says Tim (A team sounds like a good idea. Maybe I should look into that)

“And they… believe you?” “Kinda? Some of them do at least. Peter thinks its a government cover up.”

"Well. Hmm. Can I bring my baby sister into this crazy plan?”

Debate

Some internal debate.

Some debate with Red.

Verdict: Hell No.

A nightmare

Part III- A better and more viable plan, i.e. let's do a revolution. (Gray Gang)

Guess who wants to get involved? That’s right, it’s Emma.

“No.” says Tim.

Spectrum

Who are they?

(Was Ash)- royal self-aligned (ineligible for throne) pansexual non binary (genderfluid) (Prince, but non binary, thanks.)

Oh, you didn’t know this is just about succession? Wait, you thought this was about Unseelie and Seelie? Dudes, no.

Someone contaminated me. See the wings? Blue, means I'm impure, unfit to rule. 

Also, I'm like, way younger.

What will they do for us?

Legitimate heir to the throne, could challenge their sisters and demand the freedom of all the Bonded.

“I mean, I don't really feel like doing anything, but if you've got something to offer…”

“What do you want?” “I'm loooonely, be my friend.” “Oh, sure.”

Also, say Spectrum, to themself, That is a very cute boy right there and I want to seduce him.

This will not work. At all.

The Gray gang 

Emma has weedled her way into this mission.

Does not bring her group, but is in contact with them.

They try to see if they can do anything more mundane for them.

What are you?

Support group for ex-courtiers.

Made of both Black and White.

The Ones That Got Out Too Late

Courtiers who were only able to escape after they had lost a significant portion of humanity. They cannot rejoin human society.

Headed (loosely) by two who joined back in the middle ages or earlier, one from each court, they got immortality, and have honestly lived long enough at this point and soaked up enough ambient magic that they are two thirds of the way to fae already. This would worry them, if they weren’t already beyond the point of caring about pretty much anything.

Umber

Black

Original deal was for immortality, but boy do they regret that now.

Lux

White

They are one of the very few Old Whites, since humans in the White Court tend to lose their humanity through weird, magical osmosis, and the iron in their own blood starts to poison them. The ones who survived made some kind of deal to counteract that.

The Ones That Got Out With Nothing

What it says on the tin

Identity erased, no family, no money, nothing.

Maybe a boon, but it’s a pretty useless one now.

The Ones That Got Out With Trauma

May or may not have returned to family.

But how do you explain that for a while you were a soldier in a war of immortal, amoral beings?

Maybe you killed for them, and if you did, what does that make you?

Maybe you made weapons, and does that make you as bad as a killer?

Who knows! These are not fun questions!

Magic addiction is totally a thing, and very hard to satisfy unless you were born naturally gifted.

Operate under the radar

Apparently, they've been around a while.

Boy, we could have used you in part one.

Yeah, well, we've been trying to keep a low profile. You are not at all low profile.

“Touché, but what is your plan?” “Help the people who actually get out.”

New idea: what if you teamed up with us and help stage a revolution?

Hell no.

We do have this semi-legitimate heir to the throne to utilize?

No, that's worse, we're not working for THEM anymore.

Well, you wouldn't be working for Spec either, they just make the thing binding.

(Also) says Tim to himself, (Glass Mask backup plan)

Fine, I guess.

Hey, Spec, guess what!

Oh sweet, says Spec, also, did some looking, turns out there is a not unsmall faction of fae who also do not like this system.

Hell yes

Turns out they have a similarish set up on my side.

It’s Maren and Mark.

Hell yes

Part IV- Now that we’ve decided to do this thing, let’s do some awesome prep work (my favorite part) and then FIGHT! (Red Army)

Strategy/ inspiring speech montage (best part),

Tim, Red, Emma, and some of her crew hang with the Gray Gang with more frequency.

Tim is a good big picture/big plan guy, but Red is where we really get strategy.

The breakdown goes like this: Tim: Here is a goal/ step that needs to be accomplished Spec: Here are some ways to do that and their cost/benefits. Red: Here is which one is most tactically sound, given out resources and position. GG/Em Folks: Here is what you need to do that, let's go!

Tim is able to recruit some folks from the Black Court, those who do not have very constricting contracts, or those that can leave, or those that find loopholes.

Somehow, the Ladies find out about the planned rebellion and the Gang base is attacked.

The base is attacked by fae soldiers and/or loyal bonded humans

Short scuffle where some folks including Tim fight as a diversion while others make an escape route and flee to an inbetween.

Tim gets stabbed.

Shoot! (Hey look, other allies, namely, Jo)

But hey, we have someone who can help!

Really? Say Red and Emma and Spec and any defectors and probably a bunch of GG folks as well.

Yeah, say a small group, now looking slightly sheepish, uh, their name is Jo.

JO!

Bit of their back story, probably starting with “Jo never realized the dangers of lending milk money to strange teenagers…”

Recoup

Hey, Spec, can we stage the final battle yet? We’re asking you ‘cause Tim’s unconscious. 

I mean, we wanted to wait until May (or November?) Day? Because of magical significance? That’s not too far off at this point.

Okay, so we need to hold out just a bit longer.

Tim wakes up and he is maaaaad…

He actually seems just a wee bit crazy right now

Like, instead of being ruthless but clean, now he’s plans almost seem, sloppy.

“Okay, so we do this and this...” “Tim, we can’t do both of those things at once for some reason you should really know and may have actually pointed out to us at some point.” “Ah, so we can’t, well-”

He is TERRIFIED and FURIOUS, and that is not the mood you want your teenager general to be in.

This whole time, there have been continuous small strikes at any GG/ defector/ fae ally groups that are out in the open.

Like, any time they need to get food, or when trying to communicate between mortal and fae side groups

One of these missions is headed by some of the fae side operatives, and results in the destruction of a few select contracts, including Red's.

This is not helping anyone, but it is especially not helping Tim.

He feels trapped, like everything is closing in on him.

Hey, Tim, you good?

The other folks are genuinely a bit worried about him now, because this does not seem like him at all

Oops, we lose Tim.

Tim is part of a group attacked by adversaries.

He was probably not supposed to be part of this group because he is recOVERING FROM A STAB WOUND and cannot fight or defend against any members of the Black Court.

Honestly, though, this almost feels like relief, ‘cause some of these folks are definitely Whites and this is SOMETHING as opposed to however long he’s been cooped up doing nothing but planning.

Tim is not typically a man of action, but anticipation gets to even him.

Either just Tim gets taken while providing cover for the rest (look, it’s easy to sacrifice theoretical soldiers, but it’s much harder to abandon the friends in front of you), or the whole group gets taken ‘cause Tim tried to abandon them, or just Tim gets taken for the same reason. (Option one sounds more like Tim, but options two/three fit better with the devolution arc.)

Crap.

Okay, so this is pretty bad; who knows what the Black Lady's doing to him?

We (the readers) do. She's torturing him for information about this upcoming attack and how he has been resisting her commands.

We gotta do something! 

It'd be too risky to spring him, says someone, we'd probably just get captured as well.

Hey, Spectrum, when were we planning on staging this whole thing again? In just a few days, Spec says, uncharacteristically grim, He'll have to hold out until then.

This visibly pains Spec, they really like Tim, possibly a crush.

PRE-BATTLE MONTAGE BABEEY!

A reiteration of the basic plan.

People are running around, suiting up however they suit up, saying their "I love you"s however they do.

Big speech, collaborative from Rose Red, Spectrum, Lux and Umber, Maren and Mark, and Emma.

What are we fighting for today?

What we have lost, what has been taken from us.

The many who have not escaped as we did.

A better society in the future. 

This is not a rescue mission. They are not going in to save Tim, there are going in to break the system. Saving Tim is just one of the good results of this. As such, this is not a rescue speech, this is a revolutionary's speech.

Battle! 

Includes the fantastic line of “talk s hit, get hit!” by someone attacking a chant based spellcaster.

Culmination of the “Any’s Mech” sub-plot (may be a two pilot mech with Em as the other pilot)

Also includes Albus' redemption, where he does something sacrificial to help/protect Rose Red and by extension The People's Court. (The Rainbow Court? What court is Spec?) Possibilities include Albus refusing to fight when played, kneeling in submission before his opponent. That's all I got right now.

So what does this involve, actually?

This is Spec making a formal claim to the throne and showing they have the manpower to back it up.

They have to fight their way there.

They escalate from “Right to be The Chosen Heir to the Monochrome Court” to “Make Me King Right Now I’ll Fight You”

So they set up a three-way board, each side playing for itself, but also trying to play the other two off each other.

The Black and White Ladies have pieces of various shapes and talents, but they all wear the color of their court. Spectrum's side lives up to their name, it is a riot of color from all of those who have pledged themselves to them.

This might be a no-mercy match, or at least the Ladies might try and play it that way, knowing that whoever wins this game gets all the contracts.

Resolution of the Glass Mask sub-plot

Tim escapes wherever he is because he never gave his whole true name.

Before this though, I want him to have a confrontation with the Black Lady.

"Magic likes a story right? So which one is this, huh? They say there are only seven basic plots, so which one is this?"

He says it's "Slaying the Monster"

Tim sees this as his only chance to fight on the side of what he sees as justice, since by submitting to the mask, he gives up any identity he has, including the identity he “gave” to the Black Lady.

True, he becomes a kind of raging monster, but hey, it means he isn’t fighting for the “wrong” side.

This Ends TERRIBLY.

He takes a deep breath before putting on the mask

Red, Spec, and Emma are understandably freaked the heck out, that’s their friend in that thing, and he doesn’t do this kind of thing! What is happening, and can our dude be saved? 

Maybe? Currently, we know of two options: option one, and the better backed option, we try to break the mask, which will collapse this current iteration. This will probably kill our dude. Option two, which is mostly just wishful thinking, is an act of true love, and they don’t really have much there either.

They end up having to go with option one, saving the Faerie dimension from certain doom.

“it’s over we won” *monster slowly staggers up in the background* *comrades point and try to speak* “No, it’s over. We won. We’re done now, everybody go home” *a meteorite drops from the sky, killing the monster* “Will…” “That was not me” “But Will-” “That was nOT ME”

Will may or may not have residual cosmic powers

Freedom for the bonded.

Probably collaborative shenanigans with Will’s maybe cosmic powers and Spec’s new legal ones.

Part V- So, how does one live after all this? (Epilogue)

Going home?

Welp, looks like my mom remembers me now. That’s nice I guess. She’s gonna kill me.

Welp, looks like my dad remembers me now. That sucks, I hate that guy.

I grew up in the nineteen thirties. Does my immortality still apply? If I leave the Faerie dimension do I die? I have no clue how life out there works anymore, and I have no living relatives I can contact for help.

I liked living here, do I have to leave?

Gray Gang to the rescue!

Umber and Lux are fae enough and served long enough to earn themselves actual small estates. They work with Mark and Maren and combine the property and modify it with Spec’s help so that people who need to can stay there.

Some of the people they had helped in the past actually grew up to be pretty successful, like doctor/ lawyer kind of successful. The Gray Gang gets into contact with them, and people who need it get human help (therapy, temporary living, working papers, etc.)

Effect on Faerie society

Specifically, what are our main characters doing?

Probably accomplished through a scene featuring some or all of them, talking about life.

Rose probably stays in Faerie as one of Spec’s most trusted knights, so she doesn’t have to worry about going back to her dad. She is of course welcome to stay with the Gerbers, but that could get dicey legally. She is still free to come and go from Faerie as she pleases, within reason.

A news report, or a scene from Rose’s dad’s perspective. She’s out getting groceries with Will and she sees him and just. Decks him. It’s great.

"Wiiiillllll," Rose whined, tugging on Will's sleeve like a needy two-year-old, "Willll, I neeeed iiiit."

[topmixtrends]

“SOUNDS GREAT on paper.” That’s a phrase I heard a lot as a kid in the late ’70s, usually when my parents and their friends were talking about communism. Certainly an earthly paradise as depicted in the writings of Trotsky or Lenin, but — shame, isn’t it? — communism did not seem to actually work in real life.

The notion that something could sound smart in theory and not work out in practice applies just as well to another product of early 20th-century Russian thought: the individual-over-the-masses, market-worshipping libertarianism philosophy that comes from Ayn Rand. It’s been carried on, after Rand’s 1982 passing, by American acolytes including Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and, probably, someone you went to high school with.

The fact that the libertarian wonderland of absolute sexual and economic freedom only ever worked in Rand’s melodramatic novels and helium-voiced Rush songs — that her philosophy of “Objectivism” has never been successfully applied to actual governance — does not seem to cross the minds of libertarian true-believers. And to many of them, it seems not to matter: a fealty to Rand, to heroic ideas of intellectual superiority and capitalism’s grandeur, is more important than what puny mortals consider political or intellectual reality. If you try arguing sense with them, you’ll quickly wish you hadn’t.

Why should we care, then, about a discredited goofball ideology from deep within the last century? Because Ayn Rand–style libertarianism has probably never been more assertive in American politics than it is today.

What once seemed like the golden age of Rand turned out only to be a warm-up. In the 1950s, you could go to Objectivist salons in New York, where sycophants like Greenspan and future self-esteem guru Nathaniel Branden would gather round the goddess to luxuriate in every word (in some cases, the connection was more than purely intellectual: Branden was one of the polyamorous Rand’s numerous younger boyfriends). In the ’60s and ’70s, you could attend vaguely countercultural conventions across the nation where men would shout conspiracy theories and women would emulate their heroine by wearing broaches shaped like dollar signs. For a while, the Christianity-and-Cold-War strand of the American right headed by William F. Buckley Jr. marginalized the libertarians for their atheism and noninterventionist stance. From the evidence of 1971’s inside-the-whale memoir, Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, this movement was hardly built on solid intellectual ground. The abundance of selfish children driving the ship, part–Veruca Salt, part–Mike Teavee, made this seem like the kind of cult sure to wither of its own ridiculousness.

But with the Reagan Revolution, libertarianism was brought indoors, and the direct-mail New Right that accompanied the movement relied heavily on anti-government dogma. In many parts of the United States — the Sun Belt, the boys’ club of billionaires who fancy themselves self-made heroes, and various enclaves in the capital — Rand’s vision established its second beachhead.

¤

And gradually, the discredited movement that tended to attract nerds and know-it-alls became part of the political mainstream.

“I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents,” outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan told the Weekly Standard, “and I make all my interns read it.” He only backed away from Rand when her atheism caused him image problems with God-fearing Republicans, who, if they looked closely, would see that Objectivism is almost exactly the opposite of what’s preached by the Biblical Jesus.

In fact, several of the key Republican young guns are Fountainhead-adjacent. Senator Rand Paul is not only the son of longtime libertarian crank and Texas Congressman Ron Paul (he of the racist newsletters). The younger Paul is such an Atlas Shrugged–pounder that a rumor flourished for years that his first name came from the family’s favorite author.

In Silicon Valley, billionaires are working to put the “liberal” back into libertarian — at least, the 18th-century “classical liberalism” cooked up before industrialization, widespread racial tension, and modern finance capitalism. For all their quoting of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, it makes their retro version of Objectivism about as useful for 21st-century life as an 18th-century telescope. The Randed-out Peter Thiel, whose commitment to free speech did not keep him from suing a major media company into oblivion, is perhaps the most prominent Valley libertarian. But he’s hardly alone: if you wondered why Elon Musk was selling flamethrowers, just remember he’s another guy who loves freedom.

Besides the true-believers, reactionary wackjobs often stop over at Galt’s Gulch on their way to even scarier neighborhoods. Mike Enoch — born Mike Peinovich — is a racist and anti-Semite beloved on the alt-right for his The Right Stuff blog and the popular podcast The Daily Shoah. On his journey from leftist extremism to far-right derangement, he was energized by the work of Rand, Murray Rothbard, and economist Ludwig von Mises; his libertarian blog sported posts like “Socialist is Selfish” and “Taxation is Theft.”

Similarly, the polite Midwestern Nazi profiled by The New York Times, Tony Hovater, was a vaguely leftish heavy-metal drummer until he discovered libertarianism. He was, in fact, radicalized by what he considers the Republican Party’s perfidious treatment of libertarian hero Ron Paul; today he reads numerous Rand-y academics for intellectual guidance.

Then there’s Robert Mercer, one of the invisible rich people who has more influence on world affairs than just about everyone you know put together. Mercer, who helped fund Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential race, and, for years, Breitbart News, is also the father of Rebekah Mercer. A toxic rich girl par excellence, Rebekah is known to Politico as “the most powerful woman in GOP politics” and to others as the first lady of the alt-right. (She recently sowed a rift on the right by cutting off Steve Bannon’s paychecks following his tussle with President Trump.)

Even in this charmless crowd, Robert Mercer’s obnoxiousness stands out. The Citizens United decision has unleashed people like Mercer — secretive gazillionaires whose expenditures are often untraceable despite the way they remake our shared reality. “In my view, Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob,” an old colleague of Mercer’s told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

Oh, and then there are Charles and David Koch. “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy,” election watchdog and registered Republican Trevor Potter told Mayer, “to sweep everything else off the table — even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.” And, as of this fall, the Kochs now effectively own Time magazine as well as a bunch of other publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to the retro British rock magazine Uncut.

And Charles Koch’s foundation has given something like $200 million to colleges and universities, in many cases to appoint pro-business, anti-government scholars to institutions like Chapman University.

The Kochs’ defenders talk about libertarians as some kind of oppressed minority. But unlike most other right-of-center subcultures, libertarians are woven into the nation’s intellectual and cultural mainstream. If you went to a liberal arts college, live in a big city and read The New York Times or Washington Post, follow indie-rock bands and watch trendy shows on HBO, you probably don’t know many evangelical Christians. You could very well spend your days with very little contact with war-mongering neoconservatives. The rural/working-class/NRA side of Caucasian conservatism is likely something you experience mostly through Hillbilly Elegy or reruns of the now-cancelled Roseanne. Libertarians, by contrast, are everywhere. Go on Facebook, and some former friend from childhood is lecturing you about the free market.

We are now, many decades after the germination of Rand’s cult of personality, in a world where a Library of Congress survey deems Atlas Shrugged the most influential book next to the Bible. As the GOP, Wall Street, the intellectual plutocracy of think tanks and foundations, and Silicon Valley grow in coming years, expect to see the influence of this group and its ideas grow and stretch.

Despite numerous parallels with Scientology, Objectivism is not just sitting still, getting weirder while remaining confined to a few thousand worshippers. We have not yet reached Peak Libertarian. So where do these goofy ideas come from, and what effect might they have?

¤

A partial answer — both rigorously told and incomplete — comes from a recent book, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, by Wellesley College comp-lit professor Adam Weiner.

Weiner’s key insight is connecting Rand’s ideas — and the Russian literary intellectual lineage she emerged from — with the 2008 financial collapse. “By programming Alan Greenspan with objectivism and, literally, walking him into the highest circles of government, Rand had effectively chucked a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “I am choosing my metaphor deliberately: as I will show, infiltration and bomb-throwing were revolutionary methods that shaped the tradition on which Rand was consciously or unconsciously drawing.”

Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. But Weiner, a scholar of Russian literature, appears to be far more interested in one of Rand’s antecedents than Rand herself. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist best known for his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, written while its author was imprisoned in a St. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject. The book famously inspired Lenin’s world-shaking pamphlet of the same name.

There’s one small problem with this premise, and one large one. Weiner shrewdly anticipates the first: how could a man of the extreme left — who helped inspire the terrorists who coalesced around the Russian Revolution — simultaneously provide the intellectual foundation for the godmother of the market-worshipping right? He finds the common denominator in Chernyshevsky’s notion of “rational egoism,” which Weiner describes as the idea that “the rational pursuit of selfish gain on the part of each individual must give rise to the ideal form of society.”

Sound familiar? This chimes almost exactly with Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” — the bedrock of her pseudo-philosophy of unchecked capitalism, minimalist government, and rugged individualism pursued by übermensch heroes. “The main heirs of Chernyshevsky’s bumbling, illogical aesthetic,” Weiner writes, “were the Soviet-mandated novels of socialist realism and the ‘capitalist realism’ of Ayn Rand.”

Weiner deftly handled the contradiction here: a bad novel could not only become ideologically potent, but it could also inspire people who would not recognize each other as fellow travelers.

Yet Weiner’s book lives up to neither its title nor its subtitle, “Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis.” Weiner’s final chapter, “In the graveyard of bad ideas,” returns to Rand’s biography — she grew up in St. Petersburg and watched as the Bolsheviks looted her family’s possessions — and intellectual roots. But it feels like an addendum, however skillfully told, to a reasonably lucid and well-researched book about an influential but not very good 19th-century Russian novelist.

In connecting Rand — and contemporary American libertarianism — to an extremist strain of pre-revolutionary Russian thought, Weiner does help clarify this bizarre lineage, its combination of heartland America Firstism with something clearly alien to our Constitution and its mostly British political origins. Ayn Rand is not just Adam Smith in a screenwriter’s bungalow — she’s coming from somewhere different from classical liberalism.

The book Weiner seemed to be delivering — offering the intellectual history of either kook libertarianism, or the 2008 crash, or both — still needs to be written. Until then, the second edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind — released in November, this time under the subtitle “Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” — does a skillful job connecting philosophers, historians, and economists of the past with our recent rightward turn. His chapter on Ayn Rand and libertarianism, in specific, offers much of what Weiner’s volume promises and fails to provide.

“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabobov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand,” Robin begins. “The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.” Robin, a political professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, starts with pre-revolutionary Russia, but considers Rand’s real birthplace to be Hollywood, where she landed in 1926 and was quickly recruited by Cecil B. DeMille. “For where else but in the dream factory could Rand have learned how to make dreams — about America, capitalism, and herself?”

And Rand’s us-versus-them formulation of the stalwart genius against the “moochers” and “looters” — revived by Mitt Romney in his “makers” versus “takers” speech — is textbook vulgar Nietzscheanism. It also helps explain the appeal of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead to misunderstood adolescents who dream themselves the übermensch.

Rand’s novels heroize — in the same campy way she learned from Russian operettas and Hollywood movies — defiant, comically masculine builders like architect Howard Roark and engineer/inventor John Galt. It feels somehow inevitable that the recent libertarian, anti-government, pro-business strain on the American right would lead us to a man who seems right out of her pages: the defiant, comically masculine real estate developer Donald Trump.

The real history of Ayn Rand’s bad ideas — their roots, their trajectory, their collateral damage — can’t be contained in any book, however good or bad. It’s all unfolding around us, as her zombie devours the Republican Party and soon, the rest of us, with no sign of abating.

¤

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

¤

Banner image by Erik Fitzpatrick.

The post The Bad Idea That Keeps on Giving appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[republicstandard]

A Perverse Future Awaits Ireland After Abortion Referendum

Ronald Reagan infamously claimed back in the 80’s that if fascism ever came to America, it would come dressed as liberalism. His claim was not only insightful but ominously accurate. This past week has been heart-wrenching for myself and many other Irish people, and it is now with a very deep sense of foreboding that I look to the future of life in Ireland – a country I no longer recognize.

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Of course, one of the key factors I am referring to is the result of the recent Irish referendum on abortion which was carried with a 2 to 1 majority in favor of killing fetuses on demand; an actual landslide win, with 66.4% voting to repeal the Eighth Amendment protecting the rights of the unborn. Yes, legislation will now be drafted to limit abortion to 13 weeks, though bearing in mind the trajectory that Ireland has placed itself on, this limit will no doubt be extended to 24 weeks as is the case in the UK. If such liberal utopias such as the UK allow for the killing of the unborn up to 24 weeks then Ireland will be sure to follow suit. I can already hear the clamoring of the ecstatic pink-haired Social Justice Warriors demanding that Ireland embrace progressiveness while all those who even question the ethical merits will be, as per usual, shot down with the slanderous labels meant not just to silence dissent but to quash any and all opposition to the prevailing narrative – Bigot, Fascist, Nazi, etc. etc.

Ireland has now been so subsumed by the liberal agenda that the only outcome will be the eventual instillation of an authoritarian police state to quell any dissenting voices; if we are following the slippery liberal path trodden by the UK, and all the evidence now points to such, then a similar 1984-style dystopia will also be chosen as the means of ensuring stasis in Ireland. The enforcement of the UK ‘hate speech’ laws which amount to no more than forced silencing of anyone who questions the accepted narrative, is the future I now see for Ireland.

Which brings me to the other reason why this past week has deeply saddened me. Tommy Robinson’s arrest might not neatly tie in with the Irish abortion referendum, but if you have followed me so far, then I think you know where I am going with this. Tommy’s "crime" of reporting outside a court on a Muslim rape gang in Leeds would once upon a time have been hailed as essential investigative journalism; the duty bound obligation to report on every parent's worst nightmare. However, in multicultural, ‘diversity is our strength’ present-day UK, such reporting now results in a 13-month prison sentence with all recourse to due process ignored. Not only was the prevention of establishing a defense on Tommy’s part a great injustice, but the blanket ban on reporting on the arrest, imposed by the UK government on its own media, just further evidence of the measures that need to be taken in order to maintain a dystopian nightmare.

I am reminded of a section from Orwell’s 1984, where a scapegoat hate figure has to be created so that society can vent all its frustrations on him rather than on the government, micromanaging its every thought and action:

Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true.

Of course, you just need to replace the character of Goldstein with Tommy Robinson to see what the UK government was hoping to possibly achieve with his arrest. Of course, there is no need to mention the radical ideology of those arrested in the child grooming scandal that Tommy was trying valiantly to report on; something that the Sharia-compliant mainstream media in the UK is reluctant to do.

So again, if anything is a further indication of where Ireland is heading then bear in mind that the cultural replacement of ethnic Irish people in Ireland will now take place a lot sooner than the projected 2050 mark when Irish people were originally expected to become a minority in their own country. Eurostat data in 2015 demonstrated that the fertility rate in Ireland was 1.92. I think we can now safely expect that now to dramatically drop in the coming years. The ecstatic response of the Irish mainstream media and of Irish people in general to the result of the abortion referendum on such public platforms as Twitter is actually quite frightening; I really need to keep reminding myself that their champagne-swilling party celebrations (I kid you not) are to toast the future deaths of thousands of Irish children.

Ireland's fertility rate is destined to now take a dramatic nose dive while the progressive liberal Irish policy is to then fill the shortfall in the Irish workforce with people who mainly support an ideology that is not only at variance with western values, but is hellbent on the destruction of such values; an ideology though, that sanctifies the importance of large families. There will be nowhere to turn to when the diversity clash becomes a hot war. Again, I need only cite the example of Tommy Robinson.

To conclude, I am not optimistic about Ireland’s future or the way it has been used in recent years as a Petri dish of sorts to see how a society that once embraced conservative, traditional family values could be turned on its head with just the right amount of social engineering. The abortion referendum, like the same-sex referendum that preceded it, is just another indicator of the perverse path this country has chosen. Most tragically, I will watch with trepidation as the slow removal of basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are curtailed and the sinister enforcement of ‘thought crimes’ begins.

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As the Irish prime minister (Taoiseach) hailed the result of the abortion referendum, regarding it as "a historic day for Ireland", I am again reminded not only of the Reagan reference I mentioned at the outset, but a further line from Orwell’s classic which exemplifies the drastic measures a society must take to shorn its identity for the sake of maintaining perversity:

The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.

This nightmare is heralded not by the boot of the stormtrooper, but the applause of the indoctrinated masses for the extermination of the unborn.

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